Wow, nice move. I suggest anyone who considers themselves to be serious about distributed systems or operating systems take advantage of this opportunity. Leslie was hugely impactful on my early career at Sun where I ended up being the "ONC/RPC architect." One of the people who whose work I admired was Andy Birrell (who many will agree "invented" of RPC). It felt that every time I reached out to Andy on a problem that seemed complex and untenable, he would point me at one of Leslie's papers.
The book is not hard to read. Each chapter is written independently and hence the chapters can also be read independently. Each chapter presents in an accessible manner some ideas taken from a couple of Lamport's seminal papers.
In this sense, I believe reading Paxos from this book (chapter "Chapter 4 State Machine Replication with Benign Failures") would be much easier than reading Lamport's "Paxos Made Simple" paper. Actually, chapter 4 is a great read even if you know Paxos.
ACM has done more than make Leslie's book available. The Digital Library is an amazing resource. You now have no excuse for wasting time while waiting for the pandemic to resolve. Kudos to the ACM.
The notice published on the site:
To help support our community working remotely during COVID-19, we are making all work published by ACM in our Digital Library freely accessible through June 30, 2020.
> You now have no excuse for wasting time while waiting for the pandemic to resolve
I have to say, for anyone feeling bad, you have PLENTY of excuse for wasting time. It's hard to be stuck inside with all this death and financial ruin, and while some people are comforted by working and reading things like this, some people are comforted by being lazy and unproductive.
Do what you want, read a bunch of classic CS works from ACM or play Borderlands3 non-stop for 2 months, either is fine!
Yeah, it’s strange to butter ACM that have been total jerks until last week, and would not have done anything if not for the pandemia (and will resume their behavior afterwards). Sci-hub on the contrary have provided a free service for years, more reliable technically and content-wise than any library service at any research institution I worked. They are the real heroes.
While I would agree in the case of other commercial publishers, at the end of the day the ACM is a nonprofit owned by its members that invests back into the community. I don't think 100 dollars a year is excessive for what it provides.
That $100 a year is a solid value to support the profession - especially if you take advantage of the Safari membership. Heck, just being able to point people, both executives and new hires, to the code of ethics has saved me several times.
Your point about the code of ethics is intriguing! Do you point them to the code of ethics before or after the fact? Or to push back against someone trying to get you to do something unethical?
While I appreciate all the "that's great!", these works should always be free. The fact that ACM, IEEE, and other professional organizations hide works behind firewalls is a crime against progress, and will eventually drive them out of business.
While in theory I agree with you, in practice anyone who cares about academic papers or books either gets them from their university or knows how to get them for free. I don't think I've heard anyone ever complain about wanting to read an academic paper but being unable to do for free.
Well, let this be the first case you've heard of this. I just graduated, but while I was a student at the University of Sydney, I found that many journals (including ACM and IEEE, and even ISO) were not accessible through our university's library system. I usually just decided to not bother citing those papers and citing others.
It just so happens that the field I was working in (astrophysics) is one where many papers are published on arXiv, but my supervisor always got frustrated when I used the arXiv copy of a paper (sometimes the final edit of a paper isn't uploaded to arXiv so you might be citing something which was removed after the journal review). And for papers not on arXiv, you can sometimes manage to the paper on the author's website but that's hardly a workable system (and those are usually preprints and not the final draft). And yes, you can get papers by emailing the author if you really need a copy but that limits your ability to search through many papers as broad background reading (it seems a waste of time for M researchers to ask N authors for a copy of a paper, only to read the abstract and results).
Academic papers (which are publicly funded through grants and often produced by public institutions) should be free to the public. Those papers have already been paid for by the public.
EDIT: ISO not being available was legitimately a real blow -- I was working on a personal project that required reading the DataMatrix standard and I couldn't get access to it. Instead I had to try to piece together the protocol from the Wikipedia description and just gave up because I couldn't get it working.
ISO tends to be aggressive about their intellectual property, and given the prices of the standards, few people bother re-writing them to avoid their copyright. They have a lot of somewhat obscure standards that are highly priced, such as ISO/IEC 29192-x lightweight cryptography standards (each being ~60 bucks a pop).
Less well-known papers are difficult to pirate, but even if that wasn't true I also think that it's quite strange to argue that researchers should pirate papers rather than making the papers free to the public.
I work in industry in a position where having access to papers is very helpful, some would say essential.
I have access to IEEE and ACM DLs. I don’t, however, have access to myriad papers from other organizations like Elsevier or Springer Verlag. These are often cited by papers on IEEE/ACM DLs. Some are from 20-40 years ago and still very relevant and interesting.
I have yet to find a way to get access to these in a predictable manner (yes, sometimes you can find preprints or old PostScript versions on various authors academic websites, but not generally).
Often the contents are from government sponsored research from the US government and possibly other governments (if only through their support of Universities in their country).
I did my bachelor's degree in a private college in India. It was not the best even in the city it was in, and didn't have enough money for these things. Did I not deserve to study things because I didn't have the money?
Edit: Just to add insult to injury I published 2 papers while in my bachelor's and I could not access them because they were behind a paywall by Elsevier.
Again, it's very easy to find these papers. There are subreddits where people will post any paper you ask for, also there are IRC channels that will do the same. But for most stuff, you can very easily find it yourself in <1m. I agree that the papers should be free, but in practice, the fact that the papers are not free isn't that big of a deal since they are so easy to get anyways for free.
Yes, lets promote illegal behavior. There is a short story by Cory Doctorow called "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" and it makes a great point about the kind of thing you are suggesting. Here is a link to it
This is narrow sighted. In practice the Universities pay the very high fees. The major University in Paris where I did my Ph.D. and work has cut more and more of those accesses through the years and they seemed extremely expensive.
Before 1990 the activity of a scientific journal was somehow more complicated and costly which somehow justified the subscription cost. With the current Internet infrastructure and tools, paywalls feel more and more like symbols of legacy monopolistic economy rent.
You should at least glance at the table of contents of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science and read those short sections "Publicly funded science will be publicly available" and "Disadvantages".
I, for one, hadn't realized they'd made the books free to download (though I had intended to check that). I think most people assumed articles and journals when they read about the free DL access.
I don't, but keeping an eye out here is probably the best way to find out; I'm pretty sure that's how I saw the announcement above.
Lots of publishers are making their textbooks temporarily available through resources like VitalSource and Redshelf, but (a) VitalSource at least is still reading DRMd material through a clumsy app (I haven't tried Redshelf); and (b) they seem more geared towards college textbooks than to scholarly works.
Cambridge allowed everyone to access their library but then they changed it to "available online to students through their university library regardless of whether they were previously purchased"
https://www.cambridge.org/about-us/covid-19/
This is a great book, and while you're at it you may as well check out the author/editor of the book's papers. Dahlia Malkhi has either written or advised authors of some very notable papers. Corfu, Tango[1], and FPaxos are just a few worth checking out.
Took a graduate distributed systems course at UT Austin and it felt like a Leslie Lamport's greatest hits course. The best part was that all of his papers were actually really easy to understand and interpret... aside from Paxos which was easily explained by others.
All books on ACM are free to download till June 30th. If databases is your thing you should certainly check out
"Making Databases Work
The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker", creator of Ingres, PostgreSQL and VoltDB and not to mention a Turning award winner.
The epub link on that page sends me to an online reader, from which the 'Download' button does precisely nothing. This might be due to all the browser-armour I'm wearing, might be a Firefox thing, don't know. The PDF link works fine.
Anyway, if this is happening to anyone else, just copy the link for the epub button on the main page, and add "?download=true" to the URL (mirroring the pdf link). You will then get an epub file downloaded directly by your browser.
I mention this because, well, given the global pandemic now in effect, and given how closely intertwined the ACM is with their conferences, it seems like ACM might not be able to (financially) survive having all their conferences being canceled at once.
Goetz explains several parallel abstractions above the OS mutexes. Java also has Atomics, Streams, ForkJoin, and ThreadPool resources in their concurrency library. Probably starting to age at this point, but its a lot nicer than using locks.
I have read most of the chapters in this book.
I would say it's mostly about learning the concepts themselves and in this regard the book is extremely helpful. Additionally, each chapter has a historical context about Lamport's work and how it influenced future systems, research, etc. It's more like a related work section in a paper. But you could easily skip these parts if you're not interested in them.
